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cometology

cometology

All of March, Maria Womack woke up when the comet did—around three a.m. She leaned over in bed and pulled up the window shade. She looked to the east and then just a bit north, measuring with her hand about one or two fist widths up from the horizon. Sometimes the sky was too cloudy and she saw nothing at all. But sometimes she caught it, the fuzzy patch of light with its long foggy tail pointing straight up into the sky. Comet Hale-Bopp.

The hour before sunrise I find best for writing. Roll out of bed, shrug into a cardigan, stumble to the kitchen to light the kettle—give or take a quarter hour, I'll be at my desk by five, one hand clutching a hot cup of tea, the other tapping a mechanical pencil or, more often in the last year or so as the technology has grown familiar, waggling the trackpoint of a laptop, while the cold and the quiet and the black mirror of the window await the dance of words.